MOORE IS LESS

Dear Readers,

It's not easy being a liberal these days. The exuberance and relief the country felt when it replaced George W. Bush with Barack Obama has itself been replaced with disappointment and a kind of 'buyer's remorse' over it's investment in the Democratic Party. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq remain unsettled and unchanged, the economic stimulus plan hasn't stemmed the hemorrhaging of jobs and the health care reform plan is quickly becoming a program that everybody hates in one way or another. Add to this the resurgence of the hateful and spiteful, over-simplifying GOP, and you have an atmosphere of unease and confusion in a country that had so much optimism only nine months ago.

Into this miasma, Michael Moore has dropped his latest documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, and it's landed with a bit of a thud.

I've not yet seen the film, but I imagine it's Mr. Moore's usual mix of facts, fictions, comedy and the absurd, led from the front by the bulky, un-shy filmmaker. Not surprisingly, a movie chiefly about the economy has only been a modest success, probably disappointing Hollywood and it's amoral bean-counters. Even with Moore enacting hilarious stunts like placing crime scene tape around the Stock Exchange, anything to do with economics is both dull and painful. Also, since Moore is a unabashed liberal, he's temporarily (at least) on the wrong side of history.

All of Moore's films manage to stir up controversy of one kind or another, but unlike taking on GM, the NRA and Big Healthcare, taking on capitalism maybe leaves him too vulnerable to right-wing charges of hypocrisy and fudging of facts (he is, like most all of us, a capitalist). The re-statement by Moore of the evil of greed in light of the latest big-banker led economic guacamole seems like old, obvious news (and still-unresolved issues) and perhaps translates into the film's soft box-office numbers. We both love and hate capitalism (depending on which side of the whip you happen to be on) but we don't necessarily want to hear anything bad about it.

So while the Republican neocons club President Obama over the head on a daily basis with charges that he's a socialist with a secret socialist agenda, we need celebrities like Michael Moore pushing in the other direction with equally overstated charges to try an achieve a rough balance. It was once said that 'in war, truth is the first casualty', an adage that Hollywood-bashers could change to 'in movies, truth is the first casualty'. But micro-fact-checking Michael Moore documentaries is a misguided endeavor, best left to those who have the most to fear from their overall verity.